More Ohr Less 2018 and the devotion

I am still overwhelmed by the impressions that I was able to take home from this year’s More Ohr Less Festival. Here are some of my thoughts – a week later …

 

1

Everyone knows that: to go to a place where you experience intense and then comes back with wonderful spiritual baggage.

What I experienced there lives on in me; the echoes are still clearly audible in my inner resonant body including reverberation. What are such experiences for? To enjoy them at the moment, to thank them gratefully, to deal creatively with them, to cultivate them, to integrate them into your own life practice and to try to share and pass them on with others.

As always, when one is under the influence of a (new) thought, perception changes. It gets sharper: it deals with a topic, and suddenly the world suddenly seems to be full of it.

The MOL is a music festival and symposium. I call it a meeting place. Every year it has a leitmotiv, this year: Devotion.

I experienced extraordinary things in almost infinite abundance & intensity:

The lived spirit of the festival, the people, the lectures, the conversations, exchange, inspiration, spiritual affinity, an island, a large small circle, music in all its diversity of origin, style and means of production: a small, different Bayreuth, but without representation fins – instead of the Wagnerian green hill the blue Roedelius lake Lunz …

I could say that this is part of what Joseph Beuys imagined to be social sculpture.

More Ohr Less is conceivable as a social sculpture. All who were there (the ones who made it possible and those who participated in a variety of ways) work on the modeling, bringing the idea to life.

 

2

Dedication, as I could imagine in perfect perfection, would be:

the abolition of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS in SELF-FORGOTTENNESS,

or the lifting of SELF-REDUCTION in SELF-ASSET.

Dedication involves careful concentration on something in its actions. You do it for the sake of it.

Devotion leaves the path of the feasible, the way of purpose-benefit thinking, the way of economic thinking, that only worthwhile, from which one can draw a profit, what pays off. Dedication is not a cost-benefit calculation.

Devotion is no calculation and no speculation.

Dedication requires courage: for it is the way into the task of self-control and therefore also makes it vulnerable.

“Devotion allows, lets be and takes into account”. (Rosa Roedelius)

And we should be aware of this and allow it to happen: every action, even the most devotional, is based on a variety of very contradictory motives: positive connotations such as love, joy, inspiration, courage, diligence, commitment, depth, etc. but also theirs supplant vanity, vanity, fear, selfishness, loneliness, the need to satisfy individual want and emptiness, etc.

I do not have anything to do with naivety (naive, in my opinion, those who spend their lives responding to the expectations of others, who want to be what they expect them to be in the expectations of the majority opinion …).

Devotion can not be prescribed, not even “recommended”. It comes from the inside. It springs from the personal inner freedom to consciously decide for a cause. And for every conscious decision, I also bear the responsibility. Decision and responsibility need clarity for their successful realization. So devotion also means the desire to develop a difference.

In addition, it seems important to me to work out the dividing lines, to determine the critical point at which one thing can tilt into another:

At what point does dedication become self-sacrifice?

When does devotion turn into fanaticism in its multiple manifestations, that is, in compulsive or / and instrumentalized action?

Is this critical point clear at all?

 

I think devotional is necessarily the SKEPSIS, the ability to go on reflexive DISTANCE to the world and to yourself. It is necessary to reflect on the consequences of my decision, otherwise devotional action can become blind, irresponsible action.

Devotion does not fly to us, it needs an idea and a path that we have to go and practice towards the CLARITY.

And: surrender needs a lot of (open-ended) patience.

 

3

Christine Roedelius: “Life is a prayer”

Living devotion I have encountered. The attendees exchanged views. The topic was constantly deepened over the week. It always revealed new aspects, under which the topic is visible.

Devotion I experience here in the now.

I believe that the lived (and not the purported) devotion as positive energy is carried into the spirit of the world and is part of the collective memory of the world in which everything that has ever been done and thought is absorbed.

The individual devotion may seem quiet, modest and less effective given the prevailing massive dominance of the purpose-benefit / winner-loser / growth-market dogma.

It always seems to be the case that has power, greed, money and violence behind it, flattening, leveling, cementing and destroying everything that gets in the way of everything. (Beuys: “The Murder of Souls”).

But miraculously, there are always people (in every epoch, in every culture, in every place) who unerringly preserve their freedom to think, to feel, and to do what corresponds to their inner imaginations, even though, or perhaps because of themselves distinguishes from what is to be sold to them as the only “reasonable”, “necessary”, “realistic” or “successful” way.

“Hope is not the conviction that something is going well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it ends.” (Vaclav Havel)